REFLECTIONS ON LANGUAGE SKILLS

Personally I have learned a lot about the teaching English by developing the different skills, specially the games that I can put in practice in my classes with my kids, actually we have practiced some of them and we really have had a lot of fun and at the same time I have had the opportunity to evidence that it really works, students love to practice the language through these activities. Soething very important that we must keep in mind is that all of all the skills are very important and they are interconnected.

According to the things that I have learned here, is that in the web there are many different tools that can make our job easier and more interesting for our students, because the motivation is maybe one of the most important factors for learning whatever that you want to.

I would like to have the chance to perform many of the tips and tools that I got from the course, specially the ones related to the use of the technology for our classes, I talk about this, because in my particular case it looks a little hard, no because I don´t want to, but the school where I work, they are not familiarized at all with these kind of resources.

I hope that changes come soon!!!

communicative competence

To improve my students communicative skills, I try to apply different strategies that make them feel more confident. One activity that we are putting in practice right now is that every single day my students must try to speak in English most of the time, if they do it, they win a banana buck ( a paper bill) which will let them buy from a Treasure Box ( a box that we have in the classroom) at the end of the week, according to their points they have won, items that their parents have sent us like: pens, erasers, marbles, cards, candies, stickers, etc. It is working, they love this activity and thay are giving their best!!!. Now my challenge is to make them speak more English outside the classroom.

Another activity that they love is the role play, we choose an object, food, character, animal, e.g, and each student must talk about it in front of the class, they love to wear special costumes, make up, e.g, and they have the chance to interchange ideas, answer and ask questions or express opinions.

Current situation of languages

According to the articles that I read about the current situation of languages, specially English, I think that as English teachers we must study a lot to reach a high proficiency in order to give our best. By the other hand it is very important to learn another languages because the new demands will require that we speak more than two languages fluently. Nowadays, English is an important language that is used wideworld for business, communication, internet, etc. and it gives you the opportunity to have a better life because it opens doors in all the aspects.

About the present and future of English, I work in a bilingual school and the idea is that our students reach a high level of proficiency in English and we are working very hard to get it. But sometimes I think that as teachers, specially at the school where I work, we need more information and help to get our goal. I think that to reach the goal of our Government to become a bilingual country, we have a long way to go... because there are many factors that are involved in this porpose.

We should feel worry about English future because the number of English speakers is tending to decrease with the past of the time because of the economical hegemony of another countries like China.